Before you start advertising with Facebook ads, you need to understand what target market you are trying to reach. In this post, I will show you how Facebook Ads interests targeting works.
Facebook ads allow you to target people by demographics [age, gender, city, zip code, radius of addresses, etc.], job titles [for those that have told Facebook what their job titles are] and much more. The first broad targeting we do is usually “interests”.
Interests are what people search for, what they like, follow and consume on the platform. Think fishing, tackle boxes, outboard motors, etc. for a fisherman. It may be tempting to enter a lot of broad interests and run an ad against them.
This is the BEST way….to go broke with little or no results.
There are so many interest opportunities, you must get very specific in the type of targeting.
As you search the web for information, you will see many people talk about creating separate Adsets inside a Facebook campaign for EACH “interest” you are targeting. If you have set up a Facebook campaign before, you will soon realize how much work it is set up hundreds of adsets and monitor the performance.
How to avoid setting up multiple adsets in Facebook.
To avoid all of this work and get better results long term, here is how I set up Facebook Ads interests targeting.
I use a very helpful tool called Connect Explore from Connectio. This tool connects directly to your Facebook ad manager account. The key here is to search and layer interests according to how well the ad starts to perform.
I went into the exact method of this connection in another post. Check out Connectio Connect Explore Review here. That post will show you the details.
The key for this post is layering. Instead of creating hundreds of interests in separate adsets, let us use the data to market.
Look at the image above. We started out with 30 interests all in ONE Facebook adset. Then, we let the ad run for 4 to 5 days. You need time for the data to get collected on EACH interest.
After that first week or so, you go into the Connect Explore tool and pull out the results for the ad. What you will see is amazing.
It will show you each interest, the number of clicks, the click through ratio and the spend on each interest word.
What do you do with information?
This is where the Facebook Ads interests targeting layering comes in. The idea is to delete the interests that are not functioning. There is no need to spend money on interests that do no perform. After you delete the non-performers, you divide the list up into 3 different interest targets.
Like the picture above, we will put 4 to 6 interest into each interest search in Facebook ad manager. You can have up to 3 different interest search boxes. Fill up all 3 with 4 to 6 interests. Use the “AND” function in the Facebook adset.
What we want here are folks that are in the first group AND the second group AND the third group.
Now, you can see where ALL 3 of the interests intersect is where the rabid fans are hanging out.
This is why it is important to have large audience sizes also. The final audience size of the intersect should be at least 500,000 if possible.
Now, run your ads against this intersection for super targeted marketing.
For another article connecting Facebook to Connectio Suite, read our post here.
